Davos Promenade, WEF · 2022–2025
The Filecoin Sanctuary
- Spatial
- Environmental
- Collateral
Overview
For four years Filecoin Foundation ran a venue on the promenade at Davos, the Filecoin Sanctuary, hosted with CNBC. The building was a church the rest of the year. We hired it for the week and built a platform out the front. CNBC ran much of the programming; we branded all of it.
Inside, the stage carried conversations about the decentralised web. Tim Berners-Lee, Greta Thunberg, Oliver Stone, Emmanuel Macron. Between sessions the room worked as somewhere to sit down, warm, with wifi and decent coffee, which made it popular with journalists. It was one of the only spaces on the promenade that was self-branded and self-produced rather than run by an agency.
Approach
Davos wasn’t a crypto-native audience. The people we wanted in the room were policymakers and decision makers, which meant the Foundation’s branding had to introduce itself to people who had never heard of it, and feel premium and professional while it did. It had to work across environment, spatial, print and digital, and it had to be ready on time and on budget for the start of January every year, which usually meant working hard up to Christmas so everything landed in advance.
New technology, established presence
The name itself did a lot of the work, the Filecoin Sanctuary, and the concept that came with it. Huge vertical blue banners hung outside the church against the stained glass, and the branding carried through the interior. I drew an illustration for it I still like: geometric nets laid over photographs of the mountains around Davos, decentralised mountains, which ran along the bottom of screens and printed onto the banners.
Everything had to be co-branded with CNBC, which meant a process each year to keep both brands getting fair and equal coverage. Beyond the venue there was a site with the event listings and online registration, a magazine called DWeb Decoded that we gave out in print and digitally, social and YouTube titles, and merch: dedicated corgis, and umbrellas that came into their own the year it rained and half of Davos walked around under Filecoin branding.
Outcomes
The scale rose and fell over the four years, from the full venue down to the last year when we filmed a podcast on a rooftop rather than running the building. What held was the consistency. The Sanctuary became a recognisable landmark on the promenade, and it put Filecoin into the minds and mouths of policymakers, press and partners.
We also produced brand films and explainers with CNBC as part of a media campaign valued at two million dollars, with broadcast spots across Europe and Asia and advertorial placements on cnbc.com.